4 posts categorized "Kristin Esposito, CPA"

My daughter, her fiancé and I were recently looking for something fun to do in Washington, D.C. As we were poking around, we found a special attraction at the National Building Museum – a maze.

When we took our first steps into the maze, we felt excited but a little apprehensive. We knew there would be twists and turns to weave through. We wondered, would it be easy to navigate or would we get lost in a sea of offshoots and dead ends? But as we made our way through, apprehension gave way to pure fun!

The online world operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It never closes. Our society has become accustomed, even dependent, on this real-time environment at its fingertips. We read the news online, buy everything from clothes to home goods to work-out DVDs online, pay our bills online, even look for a potential mate online. And we do all of these things whenever we want, and anywhere we want - as long as there is Wi-Fi!

But, soon, there will be something that you as a tax practitioner will no longer be able to do online: communicate with the IRS in certain circumstances. The IRS announced on its website that as of August 11, it would no longer offer the Disclosure Authorization and Electronic Account Resolution products online due to low usage. This news caused an outcry from the tax practitioner community; many signed petitions to keep them up and running. We received a flood of emails and phone calls from our members, rightfully concerned about the negative impact that losing these two products will have on their practice.

Most people would agree that the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and foreign financial institutions are like peanut butter and jelly.
Whether or not you like the combination, they simply go together.

Their pairing has been reinforced by the frequent publicity
garnered by FFIs and the expanded withholding obligations FATCA has imposed on them. But CPAs beware! Lurking backstage is another set of entities
affected by the rules of FATCA that you need to keep in mind.

Everyone is talking about the new Affordable Care Act. Everyone is reading about it. Everyone is writing about it. Everyone is learning about it. But what is anyone doing about it?

Not enough is what I am hearing from my fellow CPAs. And that is quite understandable when simply thinking about the magnitude of health care reform can leave you scratching your head. But there is a way to devour the totality of the legislation without feeling completely overwhelmed: tweak your approach. Just as the saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, of course!” The same holds true for tackling health care reform, you tackle it “one provision at a time.”

Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision on June 28 to uphold the mandate requiring most U.S. citizens and legal residents to maintain minimum health coverage, many individuals and businesses put off action in case the law was overturned. Now that the results are in, many people are taken aback wondering how to go about implementing the vast array of elements that make up health care reform.